Linux and Windows XP on the same PC 2946

To elaborate a bit:

Windows XP must have a primary parbreastion (but not necessarily the FIRST primary parbreastion) on the first physical disk -- or at least, it must believe it's got such a parbreastion. There are ways to trick it, though. For instance, you can configure LILO or GRUB to muck with the BIOS drive buttignments, turning another disk into the first disk from Windows' point of view. I wrote a bit about this in Linux Magazine a while back; it's available on the Web:

The way I see it, you've got three or four basic choices:

1) Use a boot loader disk-juggling option to turn a second disk into the first disk for Windows' benefit. This will require some trickery to get Windows installed, but should work reasonably reliably once it's set up.

2) Shift your current drive over to a secondary position (say, the master drive on the secondary controller, if this is an ATA setup), install Windows on a new first drive, reconfigure the Linuxetc-fstab to refer to the new locations for Linux, and re-install LILO or GRUB on the MBR of the new first disk. In practice, this will be virtually identical to option #1, but the end configuration will be a bit more straightforward. OTOH, if there's some reason why the Linux device files for your disk devices shouldn't change, this will be a problem, because your Linux disk device identifiers WILL change if you do this.

3) A variant on #2 is to add Windows to a SCSI or serial ATA (SATA) drive. (I'm buttuming your current drive is a conventional parallel ATA drive. If it's not, the same procedure would work with other interface types, like adding Windows to a parallel ATA drive.) If you can configure your BIOS to boot from the SCSI-SATA drive over the parallel ATA drive, Windows will be happy, and your Linux drive identifiers won't change if you use a SCSI disk or the libata (SCSI-based) drivers for an SATA drive. You will need to re-install GRUB or LILO on the MBR of the new disk, though.

4) Resize one of your existing Linux parbreastions to make room for a small FAT or NTFS C: parbreastion on your current disk. You can then install the bulk of Windows to a new hard disk, in what it'll see as D:, but the few critical files that Windows needs in C: will be there. This should work fairly smoothly unless you run into Windows programs that need to reside on C:, in which case you might run out of room. I'm not sure precisely how large C: would have to be, but my guess is just a few megabytes should suffice.

On the whole, option #3 is the cleanest, IMHO; however, it does require BIOS support for booting from a SCSI or SATA drive rather than an ATA drive. You'll need to look into your BIOS features to be sure you can do this. After this one, personally I'd pick #2, but you seemed pretty adamant about not changing your current Linux setup, and if the device filename changes are a problem, that one's out.

-- Author of books on Linux, FreeBSD, and networking